Slashdot Mirror
Indian Man Charged With Blasphemy For Exposing "Miracle"
bhagwad writes "When a statue in Mumbai began to miraculously drip tears, huge crowds began to gather, pray, and collect the water in vials. Sanal Edamaruku has exposed such bogus miracles before, and when he was called in, his investigations showed that it was nothing more than a nearby drainage. The entire investigation was caught on tape. The priests were outraged and demanded an apology. When he refused, a case of 'blasphemy' was registered at the police station and they now want to have him arrested." In related news, today Kuwait's parliament "passed amendments to the Gulf state's penal code stipulating the death penalty for those who curse God, Islam's Prophet Mohammed or his wives." However, they made no change to the penalty for playing a joke national anthem at a sporting event.
Why are there so many dumb peopel?
Suck on my terrible-smelling, unwashed nutsack, you Islamiphobe. Go spew your hate elsewhere.
I don't believe any kind of blasphemy laws belong in the 21st century, but seriously...
seriously...
These people worship cows and statues with elephant heads and statues of effeminate guys with six arms
It's not a serious religion
If you are forced to take something like this seriously, and treat it like a cultural element for grown ups. No wonder people in that part of the world are so angry and uptight all of the time. Jeez.
The current crop of atheists is indeed loud, and particularly obnoxious. Maybe they're the ones to blame for the rise in religionism?
I mean, when I see the sheer seething stupidity right here on Slashdot whenever religion comes up, I'm almost tempted to join a monastery.
In the Seventies we had 'Humanists'; they surely were a whole lot nicer than the current crop of idiots.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Congratulations, you are a moron.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Which morals would those be? Promoting genocide, misogyny, stoning people to death, slavery etc etc? Those are the morals of the bible which are cherry picked "out" of the morals espoused by christians
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
There may be a small minority who want the teaching of evolution replaced by the teaching of creationism in a mystical or religious sense, but that is not an intellectually serious position.
The real debate is whether both evolution and intelligent design should be presented in school. Unlike creationism, intelligent design is not based on a surrender to abject faith and no more. Intelligent design is just a measured gut belief that the vast richness and detail of life as we know it, and particularly sentience, suggest that some unspecified intelligent agency must have been responsible for it. It is not a full scientific theory, but it is not a stupid position.
And again unlike creationism, intelligent design is not fundamentally at odds with evolution. They can coexist. Intelligent design is not really answering the same question as evolution. It goes beyond. It poses a possible answer (perhaps a convenient one, but find me another) to a series of questions which rise in most people's minds when they learn evolution. Some of these, in no particular order, are:
* Why is a flower uniformly beautiful to essentially all humans? (You can substitute "rolling landscape", "rocky coast", etc). One can understand why a flower is attractive to a bee.
* Similarly, why does a flower smell "good" to a human? It seldom tastes good.
* Why did one and only one species develop sentience?
There are also questions which appear to suggest evolution does not work "right":
* Why does a human possess serially two sets of teeth, but no more?
* Why do many species of animals sleep? That is not a survival trait.
* Why do almost all animals above a certain very low level have two lungs, two kidneys, two reproductive organs, but only a single throat, heart, and digestive tract?
* Why do only a few rather primitive animals have the ability to regenerate limbs?
* Survival, love, and competitiveness are drives that are easily explained in evolution, but how to explain why man's brain evolved with strong drives to hate, vengeance, and non-constructive exasperation?